The use of a combinatorial approach for materials synthesis is a relatively new area of research aimed at using rapid synthesis and screening methods to build libraries of polymeric, inorganic or solid state materials. For example, advances in reactor technology have empowered chemists and engineers to rapidly produce large libraries of discrete organic molecules in the pursuit of new drug discovery, which have led to the development of a growing branch of research called combinatorial chemistry. Robotic driven parallel synthesizers consisting of arrays of small batch type reactors have been designed for such efforts (e.g., Chemspeed, Endeavor, Neptune, FlexChem, Reacto-Stations). These reactors synthesize milligram to gram quantities of materials, which can rapidly be screened or analyzed by various techniques including gas chromatography, FT-IR, and UV-Visible spectroscopy.
The development and use of combinatorial methods to develop new polymeric materials is a topic of considerable current interest. A large portion of the current focus of this material-based research is the synthesis of controlled architecture materials: block, graft, dendritic and functionalized polymers. For example, the production of copolymer emulsions at temperatures well below 100° C. in a batch combinatorial chemistry system capable of evaluating 1,000 polymers/week has recently been demonstrated (see Fairley, P., “Symyx Makes ‘Living’ Block Copolymer” Chemical Week 1999, 161, No.17, 5th May,1999, p.13)
An important consideration in making these arrays is that batch reactors suffer from poor heat transfer characteristics, which may have a detrimental effect on the materials produced in batch arrays. For example in “living” anionic polymerizations, gelation and increased polydispersity, due to termination reactions or other side reactions, are examples of detrimental effects that can occur as a result of poor heat transfer and mixing. In addition, materials produced in small batch reactors still need to be scaled to an appropriate level for application testing and product qualification, requiring some process development and scale up understanding.